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AMD & NVIDIA's Linux Control Panels

03-02-2008, 08:30 AM

Phoronix: AMD & NVIDIA's Linux Control Panels

It was a year ago that AMD had replaced its aging FireGL Control Panel inside its Linux driver with the AMDCCCLE, or AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition. Since that time, this Catalyst Control Center for Linux continues to mature with a few new features being added here and there, and version 2.0 could in fact be introduced in an upcoming release. At the same time, the control panel utility that ships with NVIDIA's binary driver, nvidia-settings, has stayed more or less the same for the past few years with only a few minor revisions. How do these two Linux control panels compare though when it comes to the features? For this article we have put AMDCCCLE and nvidia-settings side-by-side to compare and contrast both utilities.

I want the Samsung monitor to be right of the notebook panel (twinview like). Under windows this works flawlessly and I simply can't understand why AMD doesn't get such a simple thing right! Afaik this is easily possible with most other drivers (with 2 x-screens)

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The article says that AMD CCCLE uses Qt, but does it really? For obvious reasons (well, not so obvious nowadays, good work there AMD) I only have nvidia cards on my computers, so I've never played with CCCLE, but ever since I saw it for the first time on phoronix and every time I see it all I think is "SO UGLY!".

Those widgets seem like a blast from the past, if I would guess I would say it uses Tk or xlibs or something like that, based on the screenshots.

Am I the only person who cringes every time they see screenshots of CCCLE? I know features are more important than looks, but I think this one takes it too far

Btw, this is just my opinion, not trying to troll

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I'm wondering if AMD is planing to release a control panel for the open-source driver. Release the appropriate API and/or source code for their existing control panel, so people can use it with OSS drivers, for instance.

by the way, I have an nvidia nv28 and most of the options shown here are missing (apart from the PowerMizer, the rest should have been available). It seems that nvidia isn't back-porting those features for their legacy cards...

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Yes, it _is_ QT. Just the chosen GUI-Style is Motif or something similar, that makes it look _very_ oldfashioned. Wonder why revievers never seem to know or just don't mind setting a more modern GUI style for their QT apps (using qtconfig).

Now for the part that matters:

I very much miss real (or even emulated) XINERAMA support, the lack of which makes two-monitor-setups USELESS for office use. This is a missing driver feature of course. Nvidia has it, and all OSS X drivers seem to have it, too. It was never present in fglrx either.

Same for the best possible scaling setting: Scale to maximum while keeping aspect ratio. Otherwise resolutins with different aspect ratio (eg 4:3 on 16:10 screen) get distorted, circles will be ovals, squares get rectangles, faces look weird. I know many do this with their TV screens, to me this just looks weird - unusable. Guess this is also a driver limitation.

And than there is this db file: don't wanna discuss it, just don't like it. Hope the OSS drivers will mature soon enough to feature all the missing, er, features.

Finally under/overclocking and power control would be very welcome of course. Temp monitoring too, better yet make it an lm-sensor.

Last but not least, i want to see all of this in OSS, and - very important- integration with both KDE's GNOME's control panels.

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Michael Larabel> AMD should turn to just automatically detected the installed or default browser for this mechanism...

Umm, whats wrong with having the OPTION to select the non default browser? At least for me the setting defaulted to my default browser, but I have the option to chose on of my other browsers if I would like to. What's wrong with that?

LordBernhard> I want the Samsung monitor to be right of the notebook panel (twinview like). Under windows this works flawlessly and I simply can't understand why AMD doesn't get such a simple thing right!

Dont worry, Nvidia cant get it right under Linux either. Every time you set things up exactly like you want it with Nvidia-settings (and saving the config), the next time you start up X, left & right screen is inverted. Luckily it's easy to fix by manual editing in xorg.cfg, at least if you know what to look for...

edgar_wibeau> Wonder why revievers never seem to know or just don't mind setting a more modern GUI style for their QT apps (using qtconfig).

Maybe because if you are not using KDE there is no qtconfig, not to mention no other themes to choose from...

edgar_wibeau> I very much miss real (or even emulated) XINERAMA support, the lack of which makes two-monitor-setups USELESS for office use.

Really? I prefer Twinview over Xinerama even with my Nvidia card, mainly because the autoguessing of software of which monitor to start on in 50% of the cases turn out to be on the wrong monitor...
I find it a lot more efficient to just open the thing I want to open on the screen I want it to be on. Saves me a lot of windowdragging...

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I know driconf is just for 3D DRI, krandrtray (and it's gnome eq.) for use with xrandr, and other applets in kcontrol/control-center control color and other settings. All of them being vendor neutral, nvidia excepted, and more often than not quite a bit more stable. As long as quirks like composite/s-video load detection are fixed with the newly released documentation in the OSS drivers, I'll be happy using krandrtray and driconf.

The binary ATI drivers have never really worked properly for me since I use -mm or -rt a lot, so using cccle is kind of moot.

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Every time you set things up exactly like you want it with Nvidia-settings (and saving the config), the next time you start up X, left & right screen is inverted.

As the article says:

The values from nvidia-settings are saved inside each user's account in ~/.nvidia-settings-rc. This file is an INI file format and is used just by nvidia-settings. This file isn't loaded automatically unless running nvidia-settings --load-config-only manually or in your login scripts.